The Magic of Magicbuilding: Fantastic Expeditions

Welcome to the Magic of Magicbuilding, our little spinoff feature that focuses specifically on building a magical system for a fantasy setting.  This week, we're going to put together an adventuring party!

...It's not nearly as "adventurous" as it sounds.

What We Have So Far

Last week, we took a look at your typical adventurer.  Someone who engages in high-risk, high-reward dungeon diving would, we concluded, look like a heavily armed hunter when working, and like they had fallen through a Parisian noble's closet when out on the town.  They would attempt to retrieve every sellable scrap in a dungeon, and they would treat a dungeon dive like the risk it is.

We haven't really elaborated on what that last part would look like, however, beyond the obvious "they wouldn't work alone."  That's what this week is for!  To start, let's get one thing out of the way:  Robert Heinlein was right.

"Specialization is for Ants"

When you're playing a game that features dungeon dives, the current meta is that each member of the party should have a primary role that they fulfill.  With limited resources and the goal of sharing the spotlight, it only makes sense that each person would have one thing that they do better than the others, and that they would focus on that.

In the real world, such extreme focus is a great way to get killed.  It follows that, in our fantasy setting that defaults to working similarly to the real world, this would also be true.

Why is specialization dangerous?  There are multiple reasons, but the biggest, easiest explanation is that life itself is built around the concept that specialization is itself a high-risk, high-reward situation.  To explain this, consider the finch.

Charles Darwin famously studied a group of finches native to the Galapagos Islands when formulating his theories about natural selection, which later became one of the cornerstones of evolution.  He noted that, over time, finches would develop adaptations that allowed them to excel in particular niches.  The finch with the best adaptation for a particular niche tended to outperform other finches, and over generations these adaptations would become more and more specific.  The thing is, these adaptations also made it more difficult for those same finches to succeed outside of their niche, to the point that the 13 different finch species he found in the Galapagos Islands were found nowhere else; the more generic finch they had evolved from outcompeted them on the mainland.

The lesson to learn from this observation is that specialization is only useful in areas where limited resources justify the effort needed to monopolize one particular resource.  In a city where there are no doctors, going through the decade of training it takes to become a doctor makes sense; in a city where there are so many doctors that your average barber makes more money (a situation that actually popped up in England during the later Middle Ages), the effort needed to specialize in medicine doesn't make nearly as much sense. 

Extending this mindset to dungeon diving means including the possibility that a risk not paying off leads directly to death.  For an easy example, consider how long an adventurer who focused solely on fire magic would last in a dungeon designed to trap fire-based monsters.  Answer:  not terribly long.

It is worth considering that, unlike finches or solo adventurers, your typical adventurer would work in a group.  Socialization lowers the risk of specialization; that's one reason that, to use an example from earlier, barbers no longer provide both haircuts and surgery.  You can make a living doing just one of those two things.  Still, with a limited population, the odds tend to favor the group that has multiple people capable of a given task, rather than just one.

Which brings us to our next point:  the size of an adventuring party would be quite a bit larger than is normally assumed.

Camp Girls (and Guys)

This is something that even roleplaying games, at one point, considered.  It turns out that your typical warrior knight wouldn't travel alone for reasons beyond specialization; they need a support crew just to be ready for battle.

When Gary Gygax first wrote the rules to Dungeons & Dragons, he treated your basic fighting man as though they were a member of the low nobility from the later Middle Ages.  A character would have a younger, less experienced member of the same class serve as their assistant, and would likely hire a henchman or two to serve as a gofer and porter.  Even this was significantly less complicated than real life.  An actual Knight of the Realm (someone who has earned knighthood, but not territory).  They would one or two squires, who put the knight's armor on for them and maintained whatever equipment was not currently in use; pageboys, who handled the horses, and grooms, who fed and maintained the horses when encamped; porters, who carried goods that couldn't be slung onto a pony's back; support for all these people (such as cooks and camp girls); a few men-at-arms who served as backup; and a quartermaster to manage all of these people and the camp.  All told, your typical knight likely had about a dozen people who went out into the field with them, and a similar number of animals.

Our typical adventurer won't require as much help, but some help will absolutely be necessary.  At the bare minimum, someone will need to guard any mounts used to get to and from the dungeon, and only the poor and desperate would go without mounts or carts; the more of both a party has, the more goods they can retrieve in a single expedition.  Porters are, again, quite useful, allowing the combatants in an adventuring party to swing their weapons and cast their spells without being encumbered by backpacks and sack goods.  In addition, there are several jobs that range in importance from "required" down to "provides quality-of-life improvements," and while the adventurers themselves can definitely cover several, every job taken by a hired hand is one less concern for the folks with the swords and spellbooks.

To give you an idea of how big an adventuring party would likely be as it descended into a dungeon, let's run through some of those jobs, shall we?

  Scout.  A prepared adventuring party is going to have two scouts.  The first ranges in front of the party, looking for safe routes, marking dangers for the main party, and reporting back when monsters are discovered.  The second moves back and forth between the party and the camp at the entrance to the dungeon, both to keep lines of communication open and to prevent the party's retreat from being cut off without notice.

  Vanguard.  The party members with the firmest defense will stand between the party and everything else.  They effectively serve as guards while the party is on the move, and will be the first to make contact with any known danger.  The exact number varies depending on the size of the dungeon and the size of the party, but two to four is a reasonable number.

  Skirmishers.  These are the party members whose job it is to guard the flanks of the Vanguard, as well as to range outward to deal with dangers that refuse to engage from the front like reasonable monsters.  Most of the ranged fighters will fall into this category, as well as those mages who mostly hurl magic at monsters.  There are likely at least as many skirmishers as there are members of the vanguard.

  Support.  Adventurers who make it easier for the vanguard and skirmishers to fight.  Mages who control the area of combat, healers, and folk who can counteract the basic traps to be found in the dungeon are all good support members.  Each supporter will have set adventurers they're assigned to support; they likely wouldn't be able to handle more than 2-4 at a time, which sets the number of supporters a given party needs.

  Guardians.  Adventurers whose job is to keep the parts of the party that are lightly defended from falling under attack.  They're kind of like the vanguard, but instead of having a lot of defense, these folks are mobile and observant.  Think of them less like D&D paladins, and more like Secret Service Agents with swords.  It would be a good idea to have one Guardian for each support member, and enough Guardians that one or two can keep watch if the party needs to rest in the dungeon.

  Noncombatants.  Members of the party who are useful enough to bring with into a dungeon, even if they aren't any good at defending themselves.  They would be watched over by Guardians, solving issues as they occur and otherwise looking for a good place to setup camp.  Possible noncombatants include butchers that specialize in monsters, porters who can run goods back to the main camp at the entrance, sages or researchers who might be able to glean information from the items found in the dungeon, and assistants who take care of the mundane tasks for the armed adventurers.

Camp Inhabitants.  The people who run the main camp.  This includes pages and grooms for the animals, squires for equipment, possibly even a blacksmith if there is enough equipment to maintain, men-at-arms to keep bandits from making any moves, and the quartermaster who keeps track of logistics.

If just the suggested number of each type was present in an adventuring party, there would likely be more than two dozen people.  A large party could get over fifty members... but not too much more than that.  The size of a given dungeon's rooms puts an upper limit on the number of active adventurers, due to the classic adage Don't Split the Party; over a certain size, the adventurers would be forced to make camp in two different areas, which would double the number of Guardians and noncombatant support staff, making the expedition more expensive with no real gain provided.  Unlike in fantasy games, the upper limit wouldn't be decided by the number of 5-foot squares in a given room, but still, space is an issue.

Conclusion

A full-sized adventuring party is roughly the same size as two platoons of real-world, Middle-Ages-era mercenaries.  This makes some sense; our adventuring party's setup consists of, basically, "Platoon A guards the entrance, while Platoon B ventures inside."

The way conventions work, we can safely assume that this also dictates how military units are organized.  That's more of a worldbuilding consideration than a magicbuilding consideration, though, and we're already stretching the premise by considering adventurers.

Next week will be our last week looking at adventurers.  We've got an idea of the typical adventurer, and an idea of what a group of adventurers would look like, but one thing we still need to consider, in light of our setting, is racial variations of adventurers.  To keep safely in the realm of magicbuilding, we'll focus on jack-of-all-trades types that use some magic and a blade to take on monsters.